Helen Chandler

According to various Hollywood actors, Helen Chandler lived her life enveloped by her own delusions of grandeur. The actress was convinced she was going to be the next Lillian Gish, which never happened. Chandler had long been forgotten when she died in 1965.

In 1937 Chandler left Hollywood to return to the stage, but a dependency on alcohol and sleeping pills haunted her subsequent career, and in 1940 she was committed to a sanitarium. Ten years later she was disfigured in a fire, apparently caused by smoking in bed.

Chandler is probably best remembered by movie fans as the fragile Mina, pursued and nearly victimized by Bela Lugosi in the original Dracula (1931).

During the early 1930s, she and Cyril Hume lived in the "French Pavilion" house of the French Village housing development in Hollywood, off of Highland Avenue, just below Whitley Heights and across the street from the Hollywood Bowl. The unique set of homes, Walter S. and F. Pierpont Davis, were razed in 1952 to make way for the Hollywood Freeway.

By the late 1920s she had become a hugely popular actress on the New York stage. That Hollywood should beckon was inevitable, but unfortunately whatever quality made Chandler a success on the stage did not survive the transition to film.

Helen Chandler was born in Charleston, South Carolina on February 1, 1906.